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We venerate leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt because they inspired millions of individuals to act directly against their self-interest and in favor of the o
by ditonal 10y ago
We venerate leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt because they inspired millions of individuals to act directly against their self-interest and in favor of the organizations that those leaders own and manage. "We will fight on the beaches" sure sounds inspiring, but if it was my intestines bleeding out onto the sands of Normandy, at that exact moment, it wouldn't have quite the same ring. Yet these inspiring words still convince millions to follow them, and so we have warehouse workers dropping from heat stroke and programmers sacrificing their personal life to fix that bug into the late hours, all so people like Bezos can live the high life, rake in millions, and write some pithy emails. Works for them I suppose, and it seems to be human nature for such type of organizations to arise and dominate. Amazon is a great company that makes a lot of money, no doubt about its success. Me? I'll try to keep my intestines _inside_ my stomach.
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y agoIt's amazing how little actual spend is needed to psych out a featherless biped. Our owners have been going to town with it since the XVIII century, when they figured out the "manufacture of consent" thingamajig.
- sievebrain 10y agoThat's kind of a ridiculous comparison. Those men didn't fight on the beaches because Churchill made a nice speech, they did it because they could see very clearly what the approaching Nazi army would do if they weren't stopped. Nice speeches from inspiring leaders helped - a bit - but frankly I think things would have worked out the same anyway. We tend to look at Churchill with rose tinted glasses because the Allies won the war, but he got booted out pretty quickly once the war was over for being, essentially, a bad prime minister.
- michaelt 10y agoChurchill [...] inspired millions of individuals to act directly against their self-interest If a Brit is equally happy living under the Nazis or a British government; or if military victory is impossible for the Brits; yes. But if most Brits would prefer to live under British rather than Nazi rule, you have something game theorists call a "Cooperative game" and it may well be more profitable on average for /everyone/ to fight rather than for /no-one/ to fight. It can even be in the self-interest of a /coalition/ to fight, tolerating non-fighting free riders, as long as the coalition remains large enough to win. In other words, Churchill convinced millions of people to act in their /collective/ best interests, rather than their /individual/ best interests.
- burkaman 10y agoWWII is like the one war you could pick where it was not against the soldiers' self-interest to fight. With most wars you could argue it's more about rulers fighting over power than it is about people defending themselves, but not WWII. It's the most morally straightforward war I can think of.
- rpgmaker 10y agoI was going to say the same thing. I still upvoted the comment because it's true when applied to most wars (and devs working at BigCos).